The Low-down on Speaking at GHC16

So you're speaking at GHC16. What do you need to know? How can you prepare to be the best you can be? How do you calm your nerves?!

Although I wasn't lucky enough to have any submissions accepted to this year's conference, I have spoken at Grace Hopper before along with many other venues. Let me start by reassuring you that this is one of the very best places to present. I have rarely found a more wonderfully supportive audience.

Let's get some of the official stuff out of the way. As a speaker, you need to thoroughly read through everything on the speakers section of the conference website. In particular, note the quick references on the right.

I'd like to draw your attention especially to the Speaker Ready Room info. There, you'll learn about uploading your slides before your presentation, and you'll see a link to the slides template. Please take the time to design your presentation using the template right from the get-go. Trying to shoehorn an existing presentation into the template tends to look unprofessional, and not using the template at all even more so. Also make sure to leave plenty of time to upload your presentation and test it. You'll want to make sure any embedded media is actually embedded, and that your fonts and colours look ok.

The conference website also includes some tips on speaking. I'd also like to share another amazing resource that brings you weekly inspiration and advice on speaking: a newsletter called Technically Speaking. Subscribe now and you will benefit leading up to your talk, and check out the archives as well.

Finally, I have a few tips of my own:

• Design your slides with as few words as possible. Convey the main idea through pictures and a short phrase.
• Add speaker notes into the notes section of the slides. When practising, you can simply read the notes at first. This should make you familiar enough to be able to improvise more day-of.
• Practice in front of colleagues at some point with enough time to receive feedback. Provide them with a written feedback form they can use to give you anonymous ideas for improvement.
• On the day of your talk, arrive in the room early to give yourself time to calm your nerves.
• Make sure you have access to water during the talk.
• Before you start, take some deep breaths, maybe with your eyes closed. Think yoga breathing.
• Invite the audience to chat with you after the talk, and stand somewhere where it's easy for the audience to actually do so.

Good luck with your talk – I'll know you'll be awesome!

Janet's Writing Blog

Please visit my new blog where I talk about stories, writing, and presenting.

www.janetkayfetz.wordpress.com

The Long and Short of Answering the Grace Hopper Call for Participation

You have a great idea for a Grace Hopper conference session. A really really great idea! In fact, as you prepare to submit your proposal, you realize that your idea may be TOO great. How in the world will you and your panelists cover everything that needs to be said in the space of a one hour session? It's just not going to fit! What do you do now? First, know that you're not alone. Others are facing the same problem as they work on their proposals. Others faced the same problem last year, and the year before. So I asked Deanna Kosaraju, the Anita Borg Institute's VP of Programs, what advice she has for those whose GHC ideas won't fit neatly into a one hour session.

Deanna's top recommendation is that you really try to make the session fit into a single hour. Why? Because, based on prior GHC experience, Deanna expects there will be approximately ten times more conference submissions than there is physical space and time available at GHC 2010. In addition, the committees reviewing the program submissions will try to accept sessions from as many different presenters as possible. I'll offer some suggestions below for how to pare your session down. But here are your alternatives if feel you just can't make that work.

Can your idea be broken into two or more one-hour sessions? Divide them up with your collaborators and submit them (separately) as a mini-track. In the submission for each, describe how it is related to the other(s) and request that they be scheduled back-to-back (if that's necessary). But be forewarned: the committee may accept your multiple session proposals but only give you a single one-hour session to present them. This happened to me a few years ago when our two-panels-plus-one-BOF (Birds of a Feather) mini-track was accepted, but we were instructed to combine the two panels into one. We did, and used the BOF for the overflow conversation from the panel.

The other option is to include in your submission an explanation of how long the session should be. You will need to make a compelling case for why the session cannot be condensed into a single hour. You'll also need to show how the agenda will be broken up into chunks no longer than one hour, so that attendees will get regular breaks. Even if you do, the committee may accept your session proposal but only give you a single hour to present it. Deanna assured me this also has happened before.

Remember: The program committees will try to accept sessions from as many different presenters as possible. And they will receive many more great proposals than they can possibly fit into the available space and time. So let's go back to Deanna's original recommendation.

How do you condense a great session idea so it will fit into a single hour? Here are a few of my own suggestions, then I would love to hear yours:

• One reason that sessions get too big for one hour is by having too many speakers. Limit the number of panelists you invite, so that each will have adequate time to share her contributions.
• Select a subset of your topic to focus on. That might mean narrowing the problem space, e.g., focus on one special case or ignore special cases and focus on the general. It might mean selecting only the most important aspects of your topic, or perhaps the most popular (like a top ten list).
• Move some of your content into a reference area in the back of your slides. You won't have time to present it but you can let attendees know it's there. Post your slides on the conference wiki for attendees to download. Or create an online resource area where attendees can go to find and/or share more ideas (this can also be done on the conference wiki).
  

Now let's hear from you. Have you streamlined a large session idea to make it fit? Have you combined multiple sessions into one? What tactics have worked well for you?

A Cryptographic Solution for Patient Privacy in Electronic Health Records

As someone who has a close family member in and out of hospitals, patient privacy is a significant interest. Melissa Chase (link goes to her awesome CV) presented about her research at Microsoft about cryptographic solutions in this field.

Below is the 15 second summary.

The benefits of digitized patient records are:

1. Easier communication
2. Increased accuracy, growing from that easier communication
3. Lowers costs because of increased accuracy and easier communication

Now for the costs:

1. 100,000 digital records are easier to steal than 100,000 paper records
2. Large electronic systems are much more open to abuse by hackers, unscrupulous doctors, disgruntled employees (such as in this case, which is not what it seems)
3. Easier medical identity theft*

Major take-way:

Patients should have full access to their records, and control over privacy should not be all (every doctor gets every patient's records) or nothing (no digitization).

Valerie's post has a good summary of the technical magic involved! This presentation went from 0-100 pretty fast, but her consistent use of clip-art characters ("Dr Alice", "Charlie" etc) made it easier to keep up. Most of the presenters I have seen need to remember: Low, Slow and Loud. Lots of fast talking to finish in time.

*Medical identity theft is where thieves get medical care they cannot afford, or access to medication and equipment for the purpose of reselling it.

Inspirational Quote:

The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanity’s language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity’s disappearance.
--Jean Baudrillard

Designing Systems that Gain Public Trust: Simplicity, Transparency, and Security in e-Voting Systems

In this presentation, Kathy S Faggiani (Milwaukee School of Engineering) posed a massively important question to her audience: how confidant are you that your vote is counted?

If you are very confidant, check out blackboxvoting.org

According to the presenter, 3%-5% of optically scanned voting sheets are counted wrong. To this cynic, this number seems plausible--constitutionally terrifying, but plausible.

Voting is what separates a democracy from a dictatorship. Constitutionally mandated privacy and accuracy affect e-voting software development in fascinating ways.

Good to know: according to the presenter, the most important legal litmus test for vote-counting accuracy is whether the vote was counted as the voted intended. This is different from whatever the machine thought the voter wanted, which is what it actually does count.

This presentation had a narrative (see Valerie's post for more on that), the data was inviting, and the conclusions were incisive.

Best quote:

"Those who say it can't be done are often interrupted by people who are doing it"

Inspirational Quote:

The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still,—and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!--Willa Cather

Student Support Groups: How to Build Them and Do They Work?

I'm part of a group of amazing women who are presenting a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session at 4:30 on Thursday October 1. It's called Support Groups for Women in STEM: International Perspectives:

Retaining women in STEM fields has been a challenge globally. Studies suggest that peer support, mentoring, and female role models help. This session brings together student leaders from around the world to discuss the strategies and challenges of building and sustaining support groups. Are these groups working? Surprising results from our research will be presented in this interactive discussion with group leaders.

I'm really excited about this talk. The five executives of Carleton University's Women in Science and Engineering (aka CU-WISE) - Barbora, Natalia, Serena, Lindsay, and me - will be showing you how we rebuilt our group. We started only a couple of years ago from nothing, but you wouldn't know it if you saw us today! We believe everyone can be successful in creating a similar support group, whether it be for students or industry professionals.

The second part of the talk is also going to be very interesting. Students from the Women in Computer Science group at Simon Fraser University and from MenTe (Mujeres en Tecnologia) in Mexico will tell us about their research on how well these student support groups are actually working.

Whether you can attend our talk or not, you can participate in the conversation! We have set up a website called Support Groups for Women in STEM, where we have posted all kinds of useful links and resources for you. We hope you will leave comments on the pages and come with all kinds of great ideas and questions in Tuscon!

On being a shy connector

Adapted from a post I made to the Carleton University Women in Science and Engineering group.

With GHC coming up soon, maybe you're excited about all the new people you'll meet... and maybe you're a bit terrified by the idea of being in a sea of strangers. Even potentially awesome strangers can be pretty overwhelming en masse!

My friend Sacha is a self-confessed shy person who is also good at meeting new people, giving presentations... typical extrovert stuff. And she does it all without defeating her shyness, but rather finding ways to connect that don't require her to be outgoing.

Check out her tips on being a shy connector. My favourite tip involves wearing a funny hat (or something else notable) to get people to come up to you and talk, because when I met Sacha I absolutely had to go up to her and ask about her huge camera and tiny computer. It works!

I've embedded her slides below, but it's worth reading her blog post that goes with them, too!

The Shy Connector

View more documents from Sacha Chua.

I'm looking forwards to meeting people at GHC! You can come see my talk on web security in the PhD forum 4 (just before lunch on Wednesday). And I do love having other people talk to me, so I may just find something crazy to wear -- keep an eye out!

How to be "Present-able" at GHC2009

As we get down to the nitty gritty details, I have been asked to blog about what to do if you are a presenter. There are many presenters at GHC, well over 300 of you! You can imagine there are also many types of presenters: keynote speakers, invited technical speakers, panels, BoF's (Birds of a Feather) - so many of you! That is what makes this Conference so special - it's unique and it's all about you - you make it happen.

So, generally, here are some things you should think about:

1. Register! Yes, you need to register in order to attend! If you only want to attend for one-day, we have a special one-day rate for speakers. Email me and I will send the code to you although you should have received it by now. The Early Bird Rate expires on Wednesday, September 9th so don't delay any longer - DO IT NOW!

2. Childcare - If you are speaking, the last thing you want to worry about is childcare - so don't! Sign up for free childcare now and we'll take care of the rest. Registration for childcare also ends September 9th.

3. Your presentation - if you are on a panel or a doing your own presentation, please use our Speaker Template and check out our 7 tips to better presentations found on our Information for Presenters page of the GHC website. Be sure to include a slide that introduces the presenters - attendees always ask for this.

4. Meet with your panelists - practice, practice, practice. I would highly recommend you create an outline of your materials and decide who will talk about what pieces given the expertise of the people participating. Meet at least twice and make sure everyone understands their role. Leave plenty of time for questions at the end of your presentation. I know many of you are just now thinking about this - schedule those two meetings NOW. Don't wait until you arrive at Hopper.

5. When your presentations materials are done, post them on our Conference WIKI. This way attendees will be able to see what you are going to discuss before, during and after the Conference.

6. There is a lot of information specific to your presentation - posters, New Investigators, etc. Please visit the Information for Presenters page for all of these details.

7. Have fun! Be on time - both starting and stopping! There will be a Hopper (conference volunteer) available if you have any questions, just look for the red vest.

8. If you have any questions, email me or see us at the Information Table at the Conference.

Do you have a suggestion for presenters? Be sure to add your comments to this blog. I appreciate your words of wisdom!

See you in Tucson,
Deanna